Hello Survivors!

Each Status Report, I've been collecting some of the community created content that you sent me or that I came across on the internet. From now on, with BETA/1.0 releases and modding support coming up later this year, we'd like to get back to the idea of having Community Spotlight articles published separately (believe it or not, that's how it's been way back!), trying to really put your content into the spotlight and not have it buried at the end of a Status Report (don't worry, we'll still link this article in the Status Report!).

For the first edition of this renewed Community Spotlight, I'll most likely stick to the classic format, but try to evolve it over time, making it more interesting to follow! 
Let's start and see the awesome things you've made over the past couple of weeks!

I hope you have noticed we have released the DayZ server files. What does it mean? You can now run your own server on your own hardware and you can configure it how you like it the most. And, of course, you can try some modding! As we said in the forum post, we are not officially supporting modding yet because we don't have all the tools ready, but it doesn't mean you are not allowed to start modding. Actually, exactly the opposite is true! We are looking forward to seeing your work!

In fact, there are already some very nice modding projects! 

Let's open up with trains. Players are crazy about them for years and Arkensor is working on a modification which should bring them to life. He recently shared his first teaser with the community. And it will be HUGE! All aboard the HYPE TRAIN! CHOO CHOO!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Aw4-lmONqM

Another creation from the community on the way is a new map called Barrandien. It is a map based on the real location in Czech Republic and it is 420 km2 large. Barradien is made by small group of loyal members of the DayZ community from the Czech Republic with a little help from our map designer Sumrak. We are proud of you guys!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiyVMYD9o1c

If you are going to check the server list, you can already find some changes. One of the new things are the 100+ slot servers. And some of them are full almost every day and run pretty nice as far as I know. Another change are spawns with gear on specific locations. These servers are for PvP players mostly, because it is something like King of the Hill and it is not easy to survive on these servers. It is really nice to see how the community is playing DayZ in the way every individual player likes it the most.

What are you doing on Saturday, 29th of September, at 9PM AST (1AM UTC)? If you are free, Boydy prepared an event with the http://pipsi.net/ server called Manhunt with nice prizes. You can find more information in the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnbgE8e3hSw
 
I want to show you some nice edits by Reddit user EskimoArctic. What do you think guys, aren't they nice?




Another talented editor is called Greenfist. Look at these awesome screenshots he made. Really cool.



And one more screenshot! Nilwick shared his screenshot that looks like a renaissance painting. And yes, it looks really like one. You should share it to r/accidentalrenaissance reddit!



Someone is really hyped for New York Comic Con! WhiteDeathDayZ‏ sent me a picture of the cosplay he wants to wear to the event and I like it! I am glad we are going to have a true Survivor there! Don't forget to share more pictures from the convention with us!



Did you know there is a community DayZ podcast? It is called Compass and it is made by Uncuepa and his guests. If you are a podcast fan this is something you would like to hear!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE7w5p0C6Do

SepticFalcon, our loyal supporter made a video how the Public Address System works. If you didn't know about it just check out his video. It is really fun with a PA system, you should try it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFgxamf5Ytk

And the last thing before the riddle. Bthntn composed a song for DayZ. It is dark and atmospheric, you can listen to it here:




Let's end with our riddle. Only one person guessed the latest location correctly. It was a player named Bakro. Applause! The place is near Kozlovka at the road to Novoselky. Not Msta, guys.

Let''s try again with another riddle prepared by Sumrak. Where is this place located? Send your answer to our Twitter account with the #DayZriddleTime hashtag.



Have a nice two weeks and see you in Chernarus!

Header picture by Jonny Rotten.

- Baty Alquawen/Community Manager

Dear Survivors,

today we are releasing the DayZ Server Files. Anyone with sufficient hardware will be able to host their own DayZ server. You are now going to have more customization options and will be able to configure your servers directly.

This, of course, goes hand in hand with new opportunities for modding as having access to the server files gives you much more freedom than ever before.

It is important to mention, that even though we are thrilled to see what our community can make we are not officially supporting modding yet. Why? Mainly because some parts of the game can change a lot and we are still finishing the modding tools we want to provide to you in the future.

That being said we definitely won't stand in the way of your creativity.

You can read the documentation and the minimum recommended system requirements here.
We believe that these files will help you create the unique server environment you always wanted.

See you in Chernarus!

Header picture by DrDeSync.

Today's Status Report will start off with a small surprise for most of you guys, so definitely check out Eugen's opening announcements. Our Lead Gameplay Programmer Mirek is answering community questions on the recent server issues and our animator Adam demonstrates the return of the surrender and restraint systems. Let's dive into it!

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Mirek
• Dev Update/Oresten
• Community Spotlight

 
Dear Survivors, we have some good news to share. The Content Update has hit the Experimental Branch today, and that means we're also making it available to community server owners currently hosting with one of our Game Server Providers (GSPs). Please expect slight delays as GSPs will cope with the number of switch requests, but I'm happy to see things finally move along to the Experimental phase after most of the critical issues were fixed in our Stress Tests. We have implemented a large number of optimizations in our network code while trying to identify an issue that in the end was caused by specific server hardware problems.

Now I have something that many of you probably don’t expect yet, but we want to see things move along at a faster pace there so we can get feedback: We've decided to release the DayZ 0.63 Server Files before BETA, and currently, we'd like to make them available to all DayZ players within the next week. Everyone will be able to download the Server Files for free on Steam under the tools section, and from that moment, everyone will be able to host a DayZ server on their own. I think that with the release of Server Files, we will see a much broader variety of server setups and community made game modes and while the full modding tool-set won’t be available before BETA, I think you guys have already figured a lot of the stuff out.

Last but not least, our goal with the next Content Update (that we might already call an Experimental BETA patch since we will be stabilizing the internal version of the game on the Stress Test machines) is to have a release in as soon as the next couple of weeks. This update will, again,introduce a variety of new things, with vehicles getting in a bit later after the initial release of this next Content Update. We will announce the new features and content as soon as we release the first Stress Test build. Just to pick one example, the new restraining system that Adam talks about is definitely one of my favourite ones.

The Xbox version of the game will see major game updates getting in soon after they hit the PC Experimental branch. While we won't be Stress Testing as of now on the Xbox platform, we will keep churning out updates with bug fixes and stability fixes to this version as they manifest themselves. Even today, we have pushed a game update with lots of fixes for bugs that we have seen in the PC version, and most importantly, we're fixing some of the specific inventory issues and controller related bugs that will make DayZ a better, more enjoyable experience on Xbox.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


Hello survivors. For the last couple of weeks we were releasing new Stress Test builds almost every day with the goal to improve server performance and to finally solve the BattlEye mass kicking. And we solved it! I'd like to describe here what we were doing and why Stress Tests are so important for us.

Probably the best way how to explain what we were doing in our last Stress Tests is to answer some questions directly from the community. Let's go through the questions that TheMagicTorch asked on Reddit, as they will nicely demonstrate our thought process.

Q: Are you working with BattlEye developers to try and resolve the issues?
A: We do have a direct communication open with BattlEye developers, and the first thing we've made was that we asked them for some input on what could be wrong. In any case, the kicking issue was there even when we disabled BattlEye, so logically, we started looking for an issue on our end.

Q: What do you think is causing the kicking? In technical terms.
So we knew that the issue is on our side, we were sure it must be somewhere in the low level part of our networking - we were thinking that the issue must have something to do with packet ordering or re-sending of lost packets, or even with serial numbers of packets. Now we know it was caused by packet fragmentation - in some rare cases, some packets were dropped and it broke down the entire server.

Q: Why are you finding it particularly difficult to resolve kicks and lag? Are the kicks and lag a result of lots of bugs that you're slowly working through, or are you still trying to identify where problems are?
The source of the kicks was just one mistake in the code, but it was hard to find it, since we weren't able to reproduce it internally. The 0.63 branch was created almost 2 years ago and a lot of changes have been made during this time period. Two weeks ago, we started to revert these changes, because it was probably the fastest way (but not the easiest one) how to find the source of the issue. We have reverted one or two improvements every day, made a build and released it on the Stress Test servers, so basically we went back in time every day (the curiosity here is that this bug has been in the build since May 2016). When we've identified the source of the issue, we started putting the reverted and working stuff back into the branch, and released it in Stress Test #46.

Lags are closely connected to the server performance, so different parts of the code may cause them. We were profiling the servers every day to find out the source of performance drops, or what exactly takes most of the CPU time. Every day, we've made some improvements, which were merged into the Stress Test branch for play-testing. It's important to test these optimizations because optimizations can often break things that were previously working fine. One optimization helped us to find out that there is an issue with the firearm damage sanity check, which caused bad hit registration. This bug was there the whole time, but after the optimization, it happened more often.

Q: Why does performance seem to vary between region?
The deployment team along with Eugen has tracked this issue down to be a problem with a hardware configuration of the servers, and we're now seeing consistently decent server performance across regions.

- Miroslav Maněna/ Lead Programmer


Hey everyone, it's been a while since I wrote something, but boy, have I got goodies today or what?

For the last two weeks, I have been working on looking through optics, surrender and restrained states.

 
The current implementation of looking through a detached optic in the latest public build had a lot of problems with it... The accuracy of mouse-to-screen is sub-par at best, and you can't accurately follow a target without moving your mouse a couple of meters. We discussed various ways to implement a solution, but I was mainly worried about the character not accurately displaying where someone is looking. If we were to ignore the player animation accuracy and just set the camera to be 1:1 with the mouse, other players could think that they haven't been discovered all while the player who's looking through his binoculars could be tracking them.

I solved this by not allowing you to move while looking through binoculars or scopes, and by doing this, I eliminated any external factors that could mess with the accuracy of the animation; because really, what kind of crazy person would be moving while looking through a pair of binoculars? One wrong step and you could lose your target entirely! Here's the animation I cooked up:



As you can see, it's quite damn responsive. Here's how it looks while looking through it:



It's in a really good state so far and accurately displays in and out of the optics exactly where that person would be looking.
Surrender is a highly sought after feature that we have been working on to deliver in the highest possible quality. At first glance, it would look like it's just another gesture; but under the hood it holds a bunch of complexities. You can't access your inventory when you're in surrendering - not something common for gestures. You also have new stance rules where you can only walk while standing and only turn in standing and crouched - also not something gestures can control. Lastly, but not least, it also has a bunch of surrender-specific stance changing animations - also something that gestures cannot control. With these things in mind, we had to approach the surrender mechanic with a bit more caution, as a half-assed approach would probably come back to bite us later down the line.

We have solved it by essentially handling it like a gesture state on the script side, but on the animation side, it would be considered an "item" of sorts. The reason behind this solution is that when a player puts an item in his hands, his character will switch to the corresponding animation set (picking up a rifle will start playing the rifle animations, pistols for pistols, and so on) with all of their specific animations for turning, changing stances, etc. By putting this "ghost item" into the character's hands, the surrender animation set is enabled, and the specific movement rules that that animation set has attached to it. In addition, we have opened up avenues for ourselves where we can have a bunch of surrender-specific animations; such as deaths, gestures, actions, etc, etc. Gestures-in-gestures? Oh boy.

https://i.imgur.com/oHeJShT.gifv

All of those same rules also apply to the restrained state, but this also means we can accurately show what item is currently restraining you; such as in this case with some locked handcuffs:

https://i.imgur.com/HpAcMOM.gifv

Maybe down the line, you'd be able to drink face-first from ponds even while restrained to keep yourself hydrated while running from your captors. Who knows!

Until next time.

- Adam Oresten / Technical Animator

 
Hello guys,

has it really been two weeks already? It passed quickly with all the community feedback from all of you Xbox and Stress Test players! I want to thank you again for the feedback, it is really important, and it helps the dev team quite a bit. 

Let's start with a new merchandise on the Bohemia Store. A lot of you already have our t-shirt but you asked for hoodies too. And here we are:



With this hoodie, you are never going to be hypothermic again!

 

A question time! You can ask our technical animator Adam Oresten any relevant question and he is going to answer them on the Bohemia Developer's blog. Just tweet your question with #MeetTheBohemians and #AskAdam. 



Do you have a problem with orientation in Chernarus? We don't have any in-game map now, but if you need to find where you are or where to go, iZurvive is a solution. It features a 0.63 map and there's also hiking trails, wells, animal locations, and more.

You can use the web map at https://izurvive.com/, or the mobile version for iOS and Android.



I want to introduce you to some nice streamers. 

• The first one is Claire aka ArrianaGaming. She is streaming almost every day and she is a passionate DayZ Survivor. Check out her Twitch channel, Instagram and Twitter and give her a follow
• The second one is RageBruhTV. He is also a very passionate DayZ player and an entertaining streamer.
• Last but not least is BenFruit, a partnered streamer with a cool voice. He is a friendly player who loves interactions. Check him out!

 
I choose four videos from the community today.

• This interview is from Gamescom made by M1NDR. He is talking with our Lead Designer Peter Nespešný about the future of DayZ.

https://youtu.be/j1-7ejPZ7bI

• Another interview from Gamescom by Luzi, this time with our Lead Producer Eugen Harton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq1koM-YJB0

• This video could be handy for Xbox players. Virtual Flood is introducing a looting guide for beginners. Finding loot is so easy! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9IhI-d2N-U

• Are you stressed? Do you need to relax? I have a nice, calm video for you. Just sit down, put your headphones on and enjoy the sound of DayZ's nature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuQATkjM1tM


The answer to the latest riddle is a house near Gvozdno. And who guessed the right answer this time?

• KainMisterr
• ‏ Leo_A_Santos
• _Canis_Dirus_
• DayzedEmu
• FiveSevenClown
• TheChewyMint
• LottaLottieT

 
And where can you find this location? Send an answer to our Twitter account with the #DayZriddleTime hashtag.



Thank you for your nice content and see you in two weeks!

- Baty / Community Manager

 

Header image by DrDeSync.

In today's Status Report our leads reflect on our appearance at Gamescom last week, where we had the chance to meet so many of you guys. Of course, the big spotlight is on tomorrow's release on the Xbox Game Preview program. For our PC players our Senior Producer Julien gave a first look at DayZ modding this week. Let's get started!

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Martin
• Dev Update/Julien
• Community Spotlight

 
Gamescom is behind us and while it has been pretty physically exhausting, it is great to see all the positive feedback from players who visited us. DayZ was playable on all three platforms, PC, Xbox and PS4, and we've had these stations full almost nonstop. All stations were running the same build of DayZ on Enfusion. It's amazing to see how far we have come in this regard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3mliPS0mrk

We've had a bunch of interesting interviews (check out Baty's part for a sample of those!), answering some tough questions a lot of you guys have had for a while, so I recommend watching these as it is hard to capture the detail in text. And I think we have done a good job communicating our vision, or the given situation in these cases. I hope you find the interviews enjoyable.

The Xbox release is happening tomorrow, and Martin will provide some additional details on that. I'll just mention that the Xbox One release shows Enfusion Engine as the future of Bohemia, as a base for what DayZ is right now and the possibility to bring our unique titles to all platforms. It''s a big milestone for us and for Bohemia as a whole. There were always concerns about performance, controls and UI, but I think there is a way to do it right and we will learn what is best together with the Xbox community itself in the Game Preview program.

On the topic of the PC Experimental release, we have made some huge progress over the last week with the issues plaguing the Stress Test servers and are planning to increase the numbers available. We are also discussing the switch over to Experimental after last of the issues is fixed.

The Internal build and its development have seen a steady amount of features and content come in. And as of now, we are mostly focusing on base building and vehicles. The rest of the features are being reviewed and setting the priority on bugfixes for BETA is in progress. We are well underway to stabilize DayZ as a whole and I'm excited to see it get in good shape in the coming months.

It has been a long time coming, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Both in terms of features, getting 0.63 to you guys, the release of server files, and modding. All things are in motion and we are very happy to invite new players into the game as well as welcome the old ones back. The growth of our community both on PC and Xbox feels almost imminent and I can't be more excited about things to come!
- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


Gamescom 2018, same as in the previous year, was an amazing experience. It's been great to meet fans and community members there in person. For me, it’s really refreshing to talk with you about the past, present and future of DayZ. I’m very happy to see that you are so eager and love DayZ so much. It’s motivational, which leads to a great psychic upbeat and spikes of positive energy.

Last but not least, I want to welcome all the Xbox One survivors into the world of DayZ. I’m excited that the next huge group of players will be able to enjoy such a unique experience which hardly can be witnessed anywhere else.

Be careful out there, it can be harsh... see you in Chernarus folks!
- Peter Nespešný / Lead Designer


Hello Survivors! The past two weeks have been among the busiest this year, and that's because we've all been handling three major things at once: the PC content update, Gamescom, and the Xbox Game Preview announcement! As Eugen covered the PC part, I'll go ahead and give you a little bit of a behind the scenes from our Gamescom preparations, and update you on the state of the Xbox version of DayZ!

Besides our own Gamescom booth, we've expanded our presence at Gamescom a little bit more this year. Thanks to our friends at Xbox, we've been invited to the Inside Xbox show to announce the release date of DayZ on Xbox one - and we've made a nice little teaser trailer to go along with that! A first one since the initial Early Access release! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er4nVkCYBq0

We've only had a very short time for the production of the teaser (about 2 weeks of time, which is absolutely bonkers), and I'd like to recognize the work of Bohemia Interactive's Multimedia department that managed to set us up with a nice video in what was a truly killer deadline! It was very much a team effort, but my hat is off to Vladimir Jaske for the great editing work, Ivo Struzinsky for game capture and the work on our camera tools, and Jan Dusek for quickly editing together a really nice sounding DayZ track (the one at the very end) with our external composer Nick Fox. I can only say the teaser got people properly excited, and I can't wait to start the production on a new video for the 1.0 release!

As we've set the tradition with Gamescom last year, along with our developers, we always bring a very decent amount of free merch to our booth. It's something that we do very differently compared to most of the gaming booths, as we make sure that visiting us is actually a rewarding experience that allows you to meet with the developers you know from online channels, and sets you up with cool swag on top of that. Gamescom is a very exhausting undertaking for the team, but this personal aspect makes it worth the hassle!

With the release date for the Xbox Game Preview announced, the teams back home started preparing themselves for August 29! The first step was letting all of the 5000 people with keys into the Closed Preview of DayZ. I'll admit, we've originally planned to do that sooner, and everyone freaked out quite a bit when our servers behaved in all the wrong ways at the beginning of the last week, but thanks to the massive effort done by our dev team, we've managed to get the situation resolved and get people to play. Looking at the feedback we're getting, there is a set of most common issues we have with DayZ on Xbox right now:

• Crashes of the game upon loading
• The inventory behaving in all sorts of weird ways (items not getting picked up, players being unable to fill in all inventory slots etc.)
• General issues when interacting with items in your hands slot (especially fireplaces, guns/magazines)
• Status icons invisible on some screens due to wrong UI scaling / cropping near the borders of the screen
• Hits sometimes not being registered when firing a weapon

I want to thank everyone for reporting the issues - be it over the Feedback Tracker, social media, or private conversations. We are aware of most of the annoying issues, and while our priority is now set on applying last minute fixes for server stability and client crashes, we'll look into the remaining critical issues right after the Game Preview release on August 29!

As our Inside Xbox announcement was really only focused on the release date, many questions were raised on our social media. Here's the answers to some of the most common ones:

• How much will DayZ cost on Xbox One? 

DayZ will be using a standard premium game model (so no free to play, or any in-game monetisation) during the Xbox Game preview, and it will be available for 39,99 USD. You can check your local price when the product page becomes available on the Microsoft Store. The price of DayZ will increase with the release out of Game Preview - the final version of DayZ will be available for 49,99 USD across all platforms.

• At what time exactly will you release DayZ on 29th?

DayZ will unlock at 7PM CEST on August 29. You can use this tool to check your local time for the release.

• Is there going to be a trial version available? 

Yes! You will be able to enjoy one hour of free playtime that you can use if you're not sure about the purchase yet. The trial version will run on its own servers, and will not have character persistence (meaning that your character progress will not save during your first hour, and will not transfer into the full Game Preview!

• How many servers will be available for the launch?

As many as needed! We have a good, scale-able setup that will always run enough servers for everyone to join, there will not be a fixed number of servers available. We'll also have teams monitoring the server status 24/7 in the first days after the release to make sure everything goes smoothly!

• Do you expect people to provide feedback?

Yes! We want to get all the feedback - you can use our Feedback Tracker, the official forums, or even our social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, or Discord!

• Can players start their own private servers on Xbox?

Not right now, but we definitely want to have that option in DayZ later on.

• Are there cars and helicopters on Xbox?

No, not right now, but before leaving Game Preview, we'd like to have both on Xbox One. Especially cars play an important role in the DayZ gameplay!


That's all for now - starting with the Game Preview release, I'd like to kick off Status Reports that focus on DayZ on Xbox, so look forward to those! It's crazy that the Xbox release is in less than 24 hours from now - so many new Survivors coming to DayZ!

We'll see you all in Chernarus!
- Martin Čulák / Lead Designer


For those of you who missed our first look at DayZ modding, let me briefly introduce myself: I'm Julien, Senior Producer at Bohemia Interactive, taking care of the modding component of DayZ.
 
As said in the blog post linked above, with the DayZ BETA closing in, we’re starting to share some information around modding.

At the moment, it is projected to be a PC exclusive feature, integrated via the Steam Workshop. It will work in a pretty similar way to how it does with Arma 3. 

In last week’s announcement we already mentioned, that DayZ is a hybrid between the RV and the Enfusion engines. While the packing and the asset creation are mostly unchanged and will go through the same process as for Arma 3, the rest (script, particles, animations, UI etc.) will be handled via the Workbench, which is a powerful all-in-one tool developed to handle everything Enfusion related.

We invite the most curious among you to read the full announcement or join the discussion - we have already received some interesting questions, which I answered.


We know that some of you have already started digging through the data available in 0.63, and the first DayZ mods are already being made. We'd like to make all modders aware that if you want to start experimenting and share your progress on your creations, you should feel free to do so - and the modding section of our official forums is a great place to do that! We are eager to discover what you’ve been up to these past weeks! 

However, please, do keep in mind that DayZ is still in active development, which means anything can change any time; e.g. scripted classes, some 3D models or textures (and anything else) might be heavily altered or simply disappear in between updates, impacting your mods. Also, we would like to ask you to not release any of your modifications publicly before the official start of modding.
As for when modding will be available: we aim for a partial release together with BETA. However, this is not set in stone. 

While the initial release of the tools is still unclear, server owners will be happy to know that the server files package should be made available to everyone during BETA on PC at the latest. 

That's all for now - I'll keep you up to date on our forums!
- Julien Vida / Senior Producer


Hello guys,
we are back from Gamescom and it really was crazy. Our booth was massive this year, we had there 10 computers, 10 Xboxes and 5 PlayStations with DayZ, and our booth was full most of the time. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_uMDtX2k0Y











 

You were such nice guys and you liked the game. It means the world to us. 



 

We organized a community meet up on Friday and I am so sorry I couldn't be there. There we so many of you, it is really nice how many of you wanted to meet us. Thank you for stopping by!


Our photo wall was a huge success. Just try to search #Gamescom2018 and #DayZ on Twitter or Instagram, you can find there so many survivors who took a photo with some gear:









 

And I have three videos for you today:

• Our favourite content creator Rene aka BarelyInfectedvisited us at our booth to ask Peter Nespešný and Eugen Harton some questions about DayZ development and the future. And here are their answers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h7runsT14w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-gvu3Yw3fI

 

• And something different right now. This is a story of a group called River Boys, full of adventure, friendship and fun until the server restart separated them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__xEFndQXCY
 

That is all from me, thank you again for stopping by at our booth and see you in two weeks!

- Baty / Community Manager
 

Header image by ExacoMvm.

Gamescom is upon us, but before we head out we have another Status Report prepared for you guys. To start things off, our Lead Producer Eugen provides an update on the current state of the first content update, as well as our plans moving forward. Our leads from gameplay programming, animation and sound give a quick recap of their past two weeks of work. We close the Status Report with our Community Spotlight. Let's get into it!

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Mirek
• Dev Update/Viktor
• Dev Update/Filip
• Community Spotlight

 
Dear Survivors,

although the struggle with the server performance is ongoing, we're seeing some good results overall in our goals. We have implemented multiple optimizations during our Stress Test period and there are more coming. Right now, we are seeing some unintended behavior in the multi-core server environment, and that's our current focus. Running servers on a single core, we're experiencing a large upswing in the server FPS that should, in theory, be even more noticeable in a multi-core configuration, but unfortunately, that is not the case now. Some of these issues are quite complex, so we will be tweaking the server code base even more.

The first content patch is in an okay state, but we're still not happy with the overall performance. As far as content goes, that seems to be received well, and I'm happy to see people enjoying the returning features and flavor that was added to them. Once we're happy with the performance itself, we will move the build over to the Experimental branch of the game and make the build available to the servers owners in our community. We know it has been a long time and the community has suffered because of it, but if we work together, we can make this dream game of ours a reality.

Besides the development of the first content patch, there is a lot of ongoing work put into other BETA features. On Friday last week, we have concluded the primary feature development and the Internal build seems to be in a good place feature-wise. The focus has shifted to bug fixing. There are more than 2000 fixes to get through and we want to make sure we get them done! We will share more details about the next patch after Gamescom.

I know some of you are worried about missing features or content. Over the last few years, there have been many features designed, and an insane amount of content created both externally and internally. Some of these things make DayZ better as a game and simulation. Some of them can be considered more or less an added flavor, or even clutter in the overall vision of what the game should be.

DayZ needs to be fun first and foremost. It needs to meet your expectations in behavior, stability, and balance. It also needs features that support the player interaction and empower players who want to invest time into learning the details and intricacies of the simulation itself. We read everything you guys say. This is a game made by gamers and for gamers. We want to enjoy the game with you and even though the struggle is sometimes real, all of us want the game to succeed the same way you do.

When we have any details to share beyond what has already been stated in the goals for the Beta release, we will do so on all of our channels.

Some of you might have noticed an increased commotion around the Xbox version of the game. What we are testing now is the same version that you're seeing on PC Stress Tests. We're making sure it runs well and provides a gameplay experience that feels good on a controller, and shows good performance. The benefits of the performance work we have done are already enjoyed by a smaller group of players that already have access to the Closed Preview, but there are so many players out there that have been with DayZ for a long time and even more who haven't had a chance to try this unique experience. One of the benefits of utilizing modules of the Enfusion engine is being able to have a game like DayZ running on a console. We always want to grow the DayZ community, and it's important not to forget about other platforms.

I'll be at Gamescom this year talking about what we will be seeing in the near future and what our goals are before we reach 1.0. I can't wait to share more with you as there are exciting times ahead of us.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

 
What would DayZ be without the possibility to restrain others and put them into captivity! Now you can also restrain yourself if you would like to plot some twist - of course you will be able to struggle free if something goes wrong. While the character has his hands restrained, his inventory is blocked as well as his quick-slots. However, his inventory is accessible by other players through the vicinity part of inventory screen. 

https://media.giphy.com/media/OO2J5QpwGnTTYsNmmV/giphy.gif

We are also working on the implementation of continuous interactions with objects in the environment. It will allow us to broaden possible interactions, like taking items directly into hands (or swapping them), slowly opening doors, seamless drinking from wells or switching channels on the radio transmitter laying on the ground.

Speaking of items on the ground, there is a comeback of dropping items from hands to the ground directly in the world (of course the 'take' animation displayed instead of the 'drop' animation in the GIF is a placeholder). The next step will be a shortcut for putting an item from your hands to the inventory cargo even without it being assigned to a quick-slot, as we would like to minimize any unnecessary access of the inventory.

https://media.giphy.com/media/NQ23rqTPGLtwsJWvzg/giphy.gif

The work on firearms is still ongoing as well. The support for the new weapon (and items) swapping animation is being implemented, after which there will be a possibility to add independent shoulders. Recently, the long awaited leaning has been reintroduced in it’s basic form (as it was in 0.62 version). However, we would like to make it more prominent and useful for gameplay later. Weapon inertia was missing as well until now and its new implementation is portrayed as sight misalignment. Its degree depends on rotation speed, a nice side effect to it is a parallax shift in the new 3D scopes. You can see them presented in Mirek’s portion of Status Report below.

As the latest addition to the pack, welcome the first implementation of lifting weapons in front of obstacles. This mechanic will prevent firearms from clipping through objects geometry, may it be walls, infected or other characters. Don't worry about self defense, as in these cases you will be still able to use a melee attack with your firearm. The lifting at obstacles takes various firearms lengths and their muzzle attachments too into account .

https://media.giphy.com/media/vy0fWoWIDb7VBKxPhk/giphy.gif

Also, progress on firearms malfunction was recently resumed and unjamming support is being added to all the firearms which will be available in 0.63 version of DayZ. Type of malfunction used is 'failure to eject' which causing mechanism to jam where next round fails to feed.

https://media.giphy.com/media/iDJmLvnnOua9OEi4SP/giphy.gif

Chance of malfunction is directly proportional to condition of the firearm. In case the firearm is fed from detachable magazines, chance of its malfunction is combined with condition of used magazine. Firearms and magazines condition can be repaired, making weapon cleaning kit a valuable and important item. With firearm malfunction in, I’m looking forward to see all that interesting situation which will emerge during the heat of firefights.

Better stock up on weapon cleaning kits... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer


For the last couple of weeks and for the next weeks, the major tasks for our gameplay programmers are server-side optimizations, bugfixing for features and content and the implementation of core systems to support new gameplay features, which can then be tweaked by designers.

Optimisations

We have found a bug, which has been in the game for more than two years but was finally visible after the introduction of ambient loot. This bug was tied to the game entity deletion and caused massive performance drops. We are also preparing optimisations for the Central Economy process, which should be done in a few days time.

Gameplay features

Vehicles - probably the biggest and most complex feature we're now working on is vehicles. Almost everything had to be rewritten (including character parts), in order to be able to add additional vehicle-related features more easily in the future. Viktor already showcases some progress two weeks ago and I'm sure we will show you more in a couple weeks.

Leaning - We've reintroduced a very basic implementation of leaning. The first iteration is in the game and now we have to polish things like animations, camera, and probably more. Check out this first teaser here: 



Weapon changing - We have implemented a basic system for the changing of weapons. For now, we are supporting only firearms, but the rest is on the way.



Sights misalignment - Which means weapon inertia in iron sights and scope. Now, only a few parameters have to be tweaked in order to achieve the best gameplay experience with this feature.





- Miroslav Maněna/ Lead Programmer

 
Over the last weeks, we've been creating and implementing new attack animations for the infected. That's light, heavy and running attacks with individual arms to get some variation into the PvE encounters. For the player character, we've started the implementation of basic facial expressions during combat-actions. We've also implemented multiple improvements for the idle character animations, like blinking, exhaustion and new idle movements in general.

Apart from that, the team has been working on placing and deployment animations that will be used while handling cars, during base building, or when placing traps. All of this comes with numerous fixes to our player animations and the animation graph.

- Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator

 
Our audio team went on a trip across our offices and beyond to record some footage for the reintroduction of vehicles. The results are new engine sounds, as well as tire sounds for different surfaces.

When it comes to shooting, we will bring back an Arma feature of the shooting controller, which silences insects and birds for a while after a gun is fired. To add to the infected, we've implemented and improved several of their animation sounds with steps and rustling clothing during three different states: idle, running and climbing.

Here you are some pictures from our tires and engine recording:











- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

 
Hello guys,

It's here, finally! Gamescom time! Bohemia Interactive is going to have a large booth with at Gamescom - with DayZ on PC and on consoles too (both Xbox and PlayStation!), so you can play on whatever platform you prefer, meet the devs and get some merch of course. We prepared a photobooth where you can take some cool DayZ-styled photos. You can try and wear a Gorka uniform, Ushanka, Zmijovka, guns, baseball bat, the Taloon backpack, High capacity vest, Ghillie and more gear from DayZ.

So if you're at Gamescom next week, don't forget to stop by in our booth D042 in the Hall 10.1, we are going to be there from Tuesday to Saturday - you have a lot of time to visit us!


 

That is all from me and now is your time!

Someone is really excited about the upcoming DayZ Preview release on Xbox! AlexRUiLs made this 3D print of a DayZ logo. Looks so good!




But he isn't the only one who has a 3D printer at home. Kerbo has it too and he printed DayZ logo as a gift for our amazing streamer TheLoyalPatriot. The logo was made b a fan of DayZ called Meyk.




What about some videos?

This is an emotional story about what happened to Chernarus when the infection started by DudeiRage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD7xeASxnAI


Syl is an awesome guy. He opened a shop in Electro to interact with people. And he had a few nice customers! Check out his shop here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ECqzh6U1q0&t=
 

NeuroticEUROtic shared a cool picture with us. He called it "Friendly Planet Cherno", but here is a question: Are video game planets flat? Who knows!




Let's check out our riddle. Where was this mystery location from the latest Status Report?




Who guessed the riddle correct this time?

• MisterrKain
• Tempest Sojourner
• ‏Emu Threat
• bullet head
• Manatee
• HumbleAtomicBohemian
• Jonny K
• ‏Herbert J. Leder
• DrDeSync

Good job guys! And the next riddle is:




I am looking forward to seeing you at Gamescom, and for people who can't be there, I am going to share everything with you on our social networks.

- Baty / Community Manager
 

Header image by Uncuepa.

 

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Martin
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Viktor
• Dev Update/Filip
• Community Spotlight

 
Dear Survivors,

let's talk about the hot topics first. The content patch -while delayed- is shaping up nicely. During the extra weeks spent on the stabilization of its features, we have solved quite a large number of issues, while the main three that were blocking the release are confirmed to be fixed as well.

Three main reasons that the patch has not been released sooner are :

1. Client Freezes (Happening in random intervals causing 10+ seconds of no response whatsoever)

The issue manifested itself in specific situations and actions of multiple players in a single bubble. We have found the cause and were able to confirm last week that it's no longer happening.

2. Stability issues (Crashes, VME and asserts on the branch)

While important, these are definitely considered less damaging on the whole gameplay experience. However, we should be good to go!

3. Scopes

During the implementation we have come across a large number of issues from animations, clipping, shaking and more that needed to be solved.

Now that we have talked about these, I wanted to confirm that the content patch is getting released on the Stress Test branch tomorrow and that it will be focused on Player vs Player interaction. During this period we might try to raise the player numbers per shard and see where the additional optimizations can take us. After the Stress Test period is over, we will port the patch over to Experimental and enable the switch to do the same for server owners. I'm looking forward to the vanilla experience as there is so much more to explore with these new features.

While all this was happening the team was working on the BETA features. We're running several work groups focused on important parts of DayZ, specifically weapons, infected, vehicles and actions. As of now, the general production is running two weeks behind and we are ready to get back on track.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

 
Survivors! I've got a couple of great news to share with you all! There's something with DayZ on Xbox that caused some surprises and confusions, so let me start with that!

 
The rumors are right! Our guys in Bratislava and Prague have managed to get the first series of builds through the Xbox certification process, and have already made them available for preliminary testing to a closed group of players enlisted in the Xbox Insider Program (basically a community of super hardcore Xbox One players and fans, as well as Xbox employees). While this is truly a smaller-scale test with only a handful of servers running, it's hard to hide our own excitement, as this is the first time we've let anyone outside of the office play the "full" DayZ experience on a console!  

For obvious reasons, this also translated into a lot of excitement (and outrage) in the DayZ community, so it's time to share some update on where we are with DayZ on Xbox. 

Current State of DayZ on Xbox

The first important thing to say is that the build that some of the Xbox Insiders are playing is pretty much on par with our current 0.63 build for PC, and shares the same features and content. The way our development pipelines are set allows for most of the progress with PC development to beimmediately used in the Xbox build, and since we've recently done quite a lot on that front, the Xbox version is already well playable. This will only get better as soon as the 0.63 content patch goes out on the Stress Test Branch. Of course, if it was all sunshine and roses, we'd probably just release the thing already, so unsurprisingly, there's a catch. A few of them, actually:

• we're still applying some minor changes to the controls scheme
• we're getting our server infrastructure ready
• we're awaiting fixes for some Xbox specific issues (UI, some user actions missing etc.)

Despite these issues, the progress with PC builds, and some platform specific optimisations already bring a good enough gameplay to Xbox, along with a generally very good client and server performance, so as soon as we get ahead of the listed issues (and as long as there aren't new ones appearing), we will proceed to the next step!

Closed Preview

If you've been following our friends from the Vigor team (they have released Vigor into Game Preview just yesterday, go check that out!), you'll get a decent idea about what that next step is going to be for DayZ - a Closed Preview. Ultimately, that's where we'll get together a bunch of the most excited Xbox Survivors among you, and give you a chance to secure access to pre-release builds of DayZ.

In return, we'll ask you to provide us with feedback on your experience, and we'll also use the traffic created on our servers to further evaluate the performance there. 

Even in the Closed Preview phase, we're probably not going to be ready for any large scale testing, so we'll pick our first bunch of Survivors very carefully, and try to involve some content creators at Mixer and Twitch to spread the excitement for others waiting to get their hands on DayZ. 

We should get to that part rather quickly though, so be prepared! For Xbox fans around you, also one more clarification: we're currently not planning on expanding the Xbox Insider build to further rings, so the Closed Preview will be your only chance to get some early hands-on time with DayZ!

Game Preview

We're probably a bit further away from the last step - releasing DayZ for everyone in the "Xbox Early Access program", the Xbox Game Preview. As we've been saying at press events over the past months, we'd like to bring DayZ to Xbox Game Preview at the end of this summer, and currently, it looks like we should be able to deliver. For the final confirmation though, we still need things to settle down a bit more, so your best bet is to wait for Gamescom (starting August 21, more on that below!) - by then, things should be more clear, and it's also a good opportunity for any release date announcements, so please cross your fingers that everything works out just fine! 

As with any Game Preview title on Xbox, there will be a trial version available that'll help you decide whether DayZ is already a fun game to you in its current state. We're considering the trial to be limited to one hour of gameplay.



I'd like to clarify one important thing - the general timing of the Xbox One release. Up until now, we've been counting on releasing the Xbox Game Preview shortly after DayZ hits BETA on PC. Since we're able to come up with Xbox version of our PC content rather quickly, and we're also enjoying tremendous support from Microsoft, we'll probably take a turn on that position. If things keep going well, we may see an Xbox Game Preview release happening before the PC BETA.

And as a last bit: I know some of you are worried about this entire console thing slowing down the PC development. We've already said that on a couple of occasions, but let me repeat this again - our primary development, where most of the work is happening on daily basis, is the PC version, and that's where any progress with Xbox builds always comes from. While we have certainly grown beyond just having 2 programmers working on things related to Xbox releases, our primary focus is, and will remain on developing the PC builds. I may let Peter expand on that, but also the overall game design vision of DayZ has never been changed or strongly influenced by the fact that DayZ will eventually be released on consoles. 

Even in Game Preview, and later on on PS4, DayZ will remain a hardcore, authentic survival game.   

 
Brief update on upcoming events: we'll be at Gamescom again, yay! Gamescom is taking place between August 21 - 25, and we're bringing a much bigger team this year, with all the usual suspects (Baty, Eugen, Peter, Dan), and a very welcome addition of our Senior Map Designer Adam! Altogether, there will be 11 DayZ developers at the event (including our new Community Managers - Tim and Bestius), ready to meet you all and show you the game on all three platforms - PC, Xbox One AND PlayStation 4 (yes, that would be a premiere!).
We're also doing our best to answer the many invitations (yes, that's you too, Boydy!) and arrange at least a brief visit of PAX West in Seattle, and PAX Australia in Melbourne. We'll keep you updated! 

That's all for today - see you at Gamescom, Survivors! 

- Martin Čulák / Brand Manager

 
As mentioned in our last Status Report, when it comes to firearms we are focused mainly on the scopes right now. In the following GIF you can see the new PSO 1 scope in action together with the new post processes. Aiming down the sights uses depth of field to blur the firearm while keeping the front sight focused. The scoped-in view is using a circular mask to blur the surroundings and creates spherical distortion to make the magnification effect more prominent.



The next GIF shows how the combination of ADS and scope is operated in a case where such possibility of firearm and scope allows it. The last mode used for precise aiming (sights or scope) is remembered and the next time the aiming action is called it switches right into it.



Regarding point shooting (not precise aiming, in other words hipfire from raise), there was sway applied from the very first implementation. However, it used the same strength as in ADS which isn’t enough for such a situation. It lead to the belief that the projectiles are always landing in the exact center of the screen. Now, we have a multiplier for sway implemented, to make it harder to hit targets further away. On the screenshot below, the left target was fired at with point shooting, the right target was fired at with ADS, both using a pistol at 25 meters. You see the results displayed by the trajectory lines and their bullet impacts.



By the way, due to the controversy revolving around "Aimgate", it’s also a common belief now, that the projectile direction when fired while point shooting is drastically bend, which isn’t the case. The angle is getting smaller with larger distances. You can see two lines on the following screenshot, the white line is the direction from the camera, the orange line shows the actual direction at which the projectile was fired. Using the 3PP camera, which has the largest offset from the axis of the weapon barrel and with the target in a distance of 10 meters, the angle between the direction of the gun barrel and the fired projectile is around 2 degrees. And to display even this minimal change in projectile direction to the players, we plan to have the weapon visually realigned towards the center of the screen.



Last but not least, alongside with the implementation of the pump-action shotgun in the new weapon system, we found what was wrong with buckshots all the time. After a rewrite, buckshots are now spawning the set amount of independent projectiles which are getting dispersed with distance and can penetrate materials.



I’m excited this change will make shotguns finally valuable and deadly - exactly how you would expect.

Come get some... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

 
In the past two weeks our animators have been working on:

• vehicles: steering wheel poses so the character can steer the wheel nicely. This includes animations like starting the vehicle, adjustments of enter/exit animations and idles.

Please be aware that everything you see here is still WIP and subject to change:

Getting into V3S
Starting V3S
Turning
Jumping out of the vehicle / Getting back in

• surrender/restrained: implementation and missing animations
• hit reactions for crouch and prone for when player character gets hit
• bugfixing related to firearms

- Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator

 
Just a very brief update from the audio team:

• new reload sounds for the MP133
• new sounds for falling trees and bushes (after hack tree and bush action)
• shooting controller for ambient sounds. Birds and insects go quiet for a while after shooting
• Coast ambience is positional now. You hear the ambience from the direction where the coast is.
• Sound Occlusion for gun shots. Gun shots are attenuated if there is any obstacle (like wall or structure) between the shooter and listener

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

 
Hi guys,

I would like to dedicate my first post to server admins. As development towards BETA is progressing, and more players are interested in permanently playing on 0.63 Experimental, we want to extend our communication when it comes to server owners and communities. We know how much time, passion and resources go into the proper management of a DayZ server, and with the upcoming changes we want to keep you in a better loop on what's coming next. This information starts with the upcoming optional switch for community servers from 0.62 Stable to 0.63 Experimental and will continue covering further changes that will affect server management.

Please be aware that we are not talking about access to "exclusive information" or a "direct line" to the development team. This newsletter will be designed to keep interested server owners informed about all changes and events coming to the very backbone of our community.

If you are a server owner, you can register HERE for the newsletter.


Sometimes I am very surprised how the community can help each other. For example XAMpew, who wants to help all poor lost survivors with an interactive online map of 0.63 that is currently on the Experimental branch. It is still not ready, but he has done a good job so far. Thank you XAMpew! You can find the map HERE.


We have already received several packages from you. Blue and Quennie sent us a teddy bear, Boydy a big bunch of Australian goodies, but one day there were seven boxes full of scotch beer in our office and we were pretty surprised! We would like to thank you Spaggie again because you made us come together in the evening and just talk about other things than just work after a long time. After all, we are not only colleagues but also friends.




I would like to introduce you to these two players who love to make wallpapers and screenshots. One of them is Harold Palmer, who has been supplying us with his great screenshots for years and he has his own web page. Check out his work HERE.


 

The second player is called Squad Crow and Chernarus is so beautiful through his eyes. You can find his work HERE.


 

Let me introduce you MrOG, the streamer who is known (besides for his fear of wolves) as an excellent sniper. And if I didn't add his clips to this Status Report he is going to snipe me too.

https://clips.twitch.tv/AnnoyingWanderingClintPermaSmug

https://clips.twitch.tv/SuperIronicFriseeHassaanChop


IS DAYZ TRASH? This question has been asked by Polish streamer TopeREC in this video. Okey, it is just a click bait header but the video is hilarious. Check it out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvMmTbCeJWk


SepticFalcon started a new series called "How To Survive DayZ 0.63 & Beyond!" and it is really handy for new players of 0.63. So if you are a 0.63 newbie, check it out, it is worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVGIDMJy7-Q


I want to show you a picture of a bug we found during our internal testing. I am not an expert but I am sure this is not the way how to aim correctly with a weapon. 



And it is time for another riddle! I found only three correct answers this time:

• Matt
• MisterrKain
• Andi Carpenter

Here is the location:


And here is a new one. Where is it located? Send an answer to our Twitter account with the #DayZriddleTime hashtag.


And this is all from me, see you in two weeks, Survivors! I am looking forward to see your content!

- Baty / Community Manager
 

Header image by apd23.

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Viktor
• Dev Update/Adam
• Dev Update/Filip
• Community Spotlight

 
Dear Survivors,

it's been quite busy around the office in the last two weeks, and there is a lot to talk about in general. I wanted to cover a couple of topics: the first content update for 0.63, and issues you have been experiencing in the past few days.
 
The problem with the legacy 0.62 Stable branch had manifested in two different ways:

a) an infinite spawn timer
b) by loading a wrong character

During the last maintenance, we switched to a temporary database to figure out a solution, making sure the issue does not repeat in the future. Since then we have identified the culprit, fixed it and will be moving back to the Stable hive during our next regular maintenance tomorrow morning. Most of you will be getting your old characters back as the data itself has not been tampered with.
 
This issue was quite rampant - luckily, we managed to get it identified and fixed in a patch released last week. The problem was caused by an interaction of multiple external factors that we have since looked into and found a workaround that will keep us stable going forward.
 
I'm happy to say that we no longer track any major gameplay issues with the upcoming 0.63 update there were assigned a priority of blocker/critical. There is a number of issues being tracked, and on schedule to get fixed, but most (if not almost all) of them can be described as visual glitches. 

As of now, the patch is scheduled for a large internal playtest tomorrow and if we don't run into any more issues, we will release the update on the Stress Test branch. One thing we're quite excited about is not only the features that we're bringing back but also the huge number of bugs that have been fixed. All this together should bring a more stable and interesting DayZ experience.

As we're seeing the comeback of the unconscious state, as well as everyone's favourites - the M4A1 and Mosin, alongside numerous scopes - we will consider using a specialized mission for testing these, probably switching back and forth from the regular survival gameplay to a more action packed combat scenario.

I'm extremely excited to see those unconscious clutch situations getting back to DayZ, as saving people and playing a hero has always been my thing a lot more than being a bandit :)

I don't want to spoil everything, but I do believe it's going to be tons of fun!

See you in Chernarus! ;)

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

 
The implementation of the firearms scopes back into 0.63 version is ongoing for some time now. Long range combat has always been a staple of DayZ and you can count on the fact, that it will be in the future as well. The focus is to bring back scopes for firearms currently in the game and those which are coming.

Switching between iron sights/scopes
The new implementation introduced the ability to use iron sights along with scope view. Of course, that’s possible only when a given firearm and scope combination allows it. If you are curious, we are not planning to do slanted sights for now.

Zeroing and accuracy
With upcoming scopes, allowing encounters over long distances, it’s time to utilize zeroing to compensate projectile ballistic trajectory. Similarly, you should be aware of the accuracy of different firearms to choose the best tool for the job. As a side note, barrel dispersion is already back in Experimental 0.63 version for quite some time, however it seems it’s not that noticeable without magnified view of scopes.

While aiming down the scope, projectiles should be fired directly from a barrel of a gun, same as it’s while in iron sights. This will prevent the possibility of some additional angle to be added to the trajectory.

Unfortunately, we found out that there is a divergence between actual projectile trajectory and directional vector of the barrel, which is definitely an issue on longer ranges. We are currently going through all aspects of range combat as we are trying to isolate and fix the underlying problem.

Revision of scopes
Reimplementation of scopes is also a good opportunity for us to revisit individual scope models, as well as their configuration. Especially their camera positions, reticles, magnification levels and zeroing ranges.

For some of them, it’s needed anyways, for example the PSO 1 can be used along iron sights, and it’s being turned into a 3D scope now, instead of just a 2D texture. This change alone requires a removal of the eyepiece to avoid the first person camera clipping, and will allow for a in-scope view as large as possible.

We don’t have a picture in picture rendering, so we're looking into adding some post-processes such as depth of field, sphere distortion and colour tints to make scopes more visually pleasing. I believe that scopes will now be be easier and more fun to use.

Zoom in... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

 
The animation team has been quite busy over the past two weeks, creating some completely new animation and improving existing ones. Let me go over a few of those.

These should provide more variety in animations and a better representation of each item in general.

We have added a new animation instance and a new set of animations (walking, running, holding) for flashlight, torch, and a flare. Players are now able to have the light in better positions.

We are testing and finding the best way of adding animations for changing gears, starting the engine, and other related actions.

We created new animations for when the player gets hit and added more unconscious variations for different items and stances. Additionally, we polished attacking animations and fixed bugs related to firearms animations. We've also made a bunch of new holding poses for various items, so your character can now hold items in a visually more pleasing way.

- Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator


This time around I won't be sharing anything brand new, as I have spent most of past few weeks squashing bugs all over the Chernarus terrain. While the 0.62 update has definitely brought Chernarus up to whole a new level, the vegetation swap also introduced a lot of issues with the object placement.

This trend continued with the update 0.63, which introduced a revamp for rocks, stones and bushes as well as a number of model updates to the environment assets (be it a complete replacement or just smaller changes to the doors and ladders). It has been a long time since a proper bug fixing passed and as the updating of 0.63 is progressing, Chernarus should definitely receive some bug fixing love from us.

Over the past weeks, I have squashed literally thousands of issues (major issues like getting stuck somewhere, problems with swimming, ladders, but also minor ones such as frequent object clipping). I am certainly not done yet and plan to continue this bug bash in the upcoming weeks before returning to the general map updates (for example we have got buildings like the city police station to add to the major towns).

There is one more thing that I would like to mention, as it is kind of tied with the topic bug fixing. Everyone knows (and loves  :)) the all-Cyrillic directional and settlements signs (did anyone say KAMYWOBO?). For a very long time, a number of settlements, railway stations and road intersections in the new (non-Arma 2) parts of Chernarus were completely missing these features. As a part of this bug fixing pass, we have re-added them along with fixing many issues with the existing signs. These changes along with the already mentioned bug fixing pass (or at least a part of it) will be available in the Content Patch #1.







I hope that you all have a great time exploring Chernarus, see you there!

-  Adam Franců / Map Designer


The last couple of weeks brought a number of updates from the audio department - we don't have any samples for you, but most of the things should make their way into the game soon enough. Let's go over a couple of examples:

• female character voice support has been added
• some new character sounds have been added
  • hacking down trees
  • cutting bark off of a tree
  • digging
  • mining for stones
  • cooking (boiling, baking, drying)
• thunderstorm sounds were improved to capture the atmosphere of DayZ just right

For the upcoming new features and content for the Experimental branch, we've mostly contributed in terms of weapon sounds:

• a sonic crack of bullets has been improved
• impact sounds of bullets have been improved
• Mosin and M4 sounds have seen some updates
  • we have a brand new set of reloading sounds for each weapon
• we've managed to fix a bug with weapon reload sounds while on the move

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

 
Hello guys,

At first, I have a news for you. Our name on social channels has been changed. We were known as DayZDevTeam on our Twitter and Facebook for a long time, but now we are just DayZ. So no more weird tweets like "I am playing @DayZDevTeam right now, come and join me!", I am so proud of Martin, who managed to change it, it is not that easy. Don't forget to tag @dayz next time!

Let's check the community content.

Do you have a Samsung Gear S3 watch? https://twitter.com/FlipGamingde has an inspiration for you. He made the most perfect Watch face ever and of course it is in DayZ style.



Some of you went to real Chernarus and sent us nice pictures from your trip. Like NiloxCSHO from Reddit, who didn't need a map to travel around this area. He knows Chernarus very well. Check out the gallery here.


 
I want to show you a talented player, who can make really nice screenshots. His nickname is Sp1kerZ and you can follow his work on Twitter. Keep it up, man.







Streamer Reece McDowall shared a screenshot with us. It is about resolving struggle between players. The king is dead, long live the king!



Love is everywhere, even in Chernarus. WineDaddy captured a picture of two lovers who don't care about the apocalypse. I have no idea how you made it, WineDaddy, but you did it right.



And the last thing from your content is a story made by M1NDR. He infiltrated a group of cannibals and tried to destroy them from the inside…

And we want to congratulate M1NDR because he hit 100 000 subscribers on his YouTube channel today! You are amazing, man and we <3 you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9aWK_9PNtA

You've sent me so many answers to the last riddle, I was really surprised! But only a few were correct. Here is a wall of fame!

• Puddin_TheKrow
• D. E. Parry
• Rustycaddy
• CanisDirus
• Go Up
• Setup
• Jacob_Mango

 
And here is a next one. Can you guess where is this location? It is not so hard this time! Tweet your answer to our official Twitter channel with a #DayZriddleTime hashtag. Don't forget, our Twitter is changed to @DayZ now. 



Thank you for reading today's Status Report till here and see you in two weeks.

- Baty / Community Manager
 

Header image by CMDR_sunny.

Hello Survivors,

as this week we have some national holidays coming up in the Czech Republic and a big part of the team took this chance to take a few days of vacation, this Status Report will be shorter than usual. However, we are diving into exciting content regardless, as we will be talking about the upcoming first big update for 0.63. And we are happy to showcase another huge collection of your awesome community content - Let's get to it!

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Community Spotlight

 
Dear Survivors,
it's about time to talk about the content update that's coming to Stress Test branch very soon and will get rolled over to the Experimental servers after making sure everything works as intended. We will try and batch the content updates in this way so we can stabilize and make sure the content works properly.

• AI Sensors/Audibility/Visibility

With this change you will see your stealth options getting expanded by quite a bit: Besides stances, the colours and weight of items will affect your ability to avoid zombies and confuse their perception.

• Hidden Stash

With this feature, you'll be able to hide your loot underground and put containers to use. The shovel will be spawning alongside the new containers ready to use. Same goes for corpses.

• Character - Unconsciousness

Shock stat and weapon hits that increase it can cause the character to fall unconscious to be possibly saved by friends in your group. With the unconsciousness state, you'll be seeing more options to disable players and interact with them in combat.

• CPR 

The ability to CPR people with high shock values.

• Gestures

The new radial menu alongside the newly added gestures will now be available for even more interactions and videos you may create.

• Repairing 

Items like the Sewing kit, Weapon Cleaning kit, Duct tape and more are seeing a comeback as durability matters again. Weapons don't jam yet but that's something you'll definitely see in a future content update.

• New weapons

Yes, there are new weapons coming to the game and it's two classics that everybody loves. M4A1 and Mosin. Yay!

• Scopes

There is no definite list of scopes coming yet in the first content update, but, based on the weapons currently in the game, we will deliver a meaningful selection.

• Soft skills

The Soft skills are getting in, so you'll see the basic specializations working and your crafts bringing better results faster.

• Environmental Exposure

The temperature system will start working without any repercussions first to gather more information on how harsh we want to get.

• Jumping

We have started working on a huge animation set for jumps and climbing this year. So with the upcoming update, the first part of this package is gonna get in and give you the ability to cross some basic obstacles improving your manoeuvrability throughout Chernarus.

• Diseases

Diseases and associated effects (coughing, sneezing and more) are returning as well as items that resolve possible negatives, such as purification tablets. This includes the possibility of diseases transfer from player to player and items.

• Compass 

The first part of the navigation system in DayZ besides the new map is the compass. Hopefully, it will help you to learn more about Chernarus and its intricacies.

• Ambient Loot

One of the core features that we want to use to solve a possible lack of loot is a set of items that spawn not centrally but based on the player position and interactions. This might need a lot more tweaks, so expect its values to change even during testing.

• Voice Communication

The whole Voice Communication system along with radios, public radios, megaphone etc. is coming to the game to give you objectives on the map as well as new options to communicate and meet with other survivors in the game.



So, how soon this is going to happen? The features listed here are undergoing testing as of now and the content has been branched away from the internal development version with many more fixes and improvements to stability, security and server performance.

On a side note, since in the internal version of this patch, we resolved the GDPR issues blocking the ability to switch to the experimental version, with its introduction we will enable this option for server owners. I'm personally looking forward to all this content coming back alongside things that changed and have been improved upon heavily. See you in Chernarus!

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

 
Hello Survivors,

This weekend, Nine Inch Nails (a band that many of us in the dev team like) had a gig at the Aerodrome festival near Prague, and guess what - Alessandro Cortini, who's been a member of NIN for quite some time now, is a fellow DayZ survivor! We could not pass on the opportunity to meet with Alessandro, and so we did bother him for a bit before he went up on stage! It's been so awesome to chat and listen to some of his stories! Just a brief look at his DayZ t-shirt reassured us that he's serious about being a fan - the condition of the t-shirt has been way, way past pristine, and so we set him up with a new one :) Check out Alessandro on iTunes or SoundCloud, and look for him on Chernarus. Remember - talk to people! You never know who's on the other side, it could be someone from your favorite band!


Let's check out some new video content:

An emotional story of the life of Ricky Jameson by CamCANTRUN recorded in DayZ and the Arma 3 Eden Editor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAO1SrvzRnk
 
Ant made a DayZ fan trailer and it is really nice!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh_Xf1alkHY
 
Rustycaddy made a video in honor of our beautiful Chernarus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDQaQtKDJ1w

This is a story about the great opening of Uncuepa's bar. It starts really nice, there were a plenty delicious food, drinks and music, but what happened in the end wasn't nice…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWDGNnFsyhQ

 
And what about some of your pictures and drawings? Check it out:

The first one is a nice edit of a screenshot by the famous DrDesync.

 

Another edit is made by Reddit user TheWhishImBallHorson named "They Found Me". Good job!



Zarrov sent us a sketch of his idea of barricading. It looks impressive!

 

It is an end of a school year and Barrett5Bumpas is getting bored at his classes. So he made this DayZ inspired picture. It is really nice, but don't forget - education is more important than video games!



Do you know you can change the skin of your Steam? I didn't know until today. Mdswish shared his DayZ themed customized skin with the community, you can download it here.



Do you remember the photo series Humans of Chernarus? It continues and it is still really cool. If you don't know it, it is a portrait of some DayZ characters living on the DayZ Underground server, the project is inspired by Humans of New York.



And the last community content for today are Joito's Twitch alerts made by the talented Cobalt_Smobalt. They are so awesome!






 

Let's check the riddle.

Who guessed the riddle from the last Status Report? 

• Emu Threat
• basedBara_RL
• CanisDirus

 

The correct answer was a Little Hill near Mogilevka.



 

And the riddle for this Status Report is:



If you know where is it, tweet it to our official Twitter account with #DayZriddleTime and you can be on the Wall of Fame next time.

Thank you for every content you've sent me and see you next time!

- Baty / Community Manager

Header image by A1ANNUAKII.

 

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Viktor
• Dev Update/Adam Oresten
• Dev Update/Adam Franců
• Dev Update/Filip
• Community Spotlight

 
Dear Survivors,

the Experimental release is behind us, but the work does not stop here. So I would like to look at the issues present, troubling the community playing this version and also talk about the internal development that has happened and features you'll be seeing very soon on the Stress Test and Experimental branch. We kept both of the branches active to make sure we don't break Experimental too often and have features coming into it with more polish. While 0.63 is heavy on new technology, we know it's quite light on content. But you will be able to enjoy a lot of the new stuff in the upcoming weeks.

The issues that take longest to iron out are related to the stability of client and server, and problems that would end up interrupting your play sessions for various reasons. From locked characters, to server kicks or just unexpected crashes to desktop. Things are getting better, but there is more to be done in this regard and we continue to monitor the situation and apply fixes to make sure we eliminate this as soon as possible. We know its not there yet and its our top priority.

We should also talk about our plan to make the Experimental servers available to server owners currently running their communities. Sadly this had to be slightly postponed due to changes necessary for GDPR and memory leaks wreaking havoc on stability and performance. These seem to be fixed as of today, so very soon you will be able to switch over and enjoy the updated version with your fellow community members on your own terms.

In terms of development, we are currently moving along quite nicely with only small delays in features planned out internally. The benefits of the new technology are already showing themselves in the pace of implementation. We are also looking into possible solutions to issues that currently cause these delays and make sure we deliver. Let's go over the current state of development and features themselves.

We can consider finished for Experimental phase:

• Hidden stash
• CPR
• Gestures
• Repairing
• UI Main Menu
• Soft Skills
• Environmental Exposure
• Goat - Animal

Last week we have moved/continue to the review/bug fixing of:

• Character Unconsciousness
• Chambering Loop
• Fireplace
• Jump
• UI Server Browser
• Cooking
• Weapon/Item Swap Action/Animation
• Compass
• Gathering Ambient Loot
• Gathering Actions
• Vehicles - Open/Close doors
• Vehicles - Attach/Detach vehicle parts
• Injured Animations

This week is dedicated to the internal implementation of:

• Climbing
• Weapon dispersion
• Weapon zeroing
• Weapons - Double Barrel
• Diseases
• Scopes
• Enfusion Hierarchy
• New Input System
• Action Animations
• Collisions during melee

So you might be asking yourself when these things hit Stress Test and Experimental branches. We plan to switch over a bunch of these very soon, and you can expect to have these available in batches over the coming weeks. However, we want to aim for at least unconscious state to be finished in different edge cases. As of now, there are still small issues with ladder/water unconscious state interactions that are not ready for the Stress Test, but this week we should see them fixed and as such moved to the Stress Test branch alongside many other new features and content.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

 
Hello everyone, today I would like to share with you in this short update what the animation team has been working on for the past weeks and what is going on at the moment. Obviously, the player character is important to us, so we continue improving its behaviour and what it can do.

At the moment, we are revisiting some of the animations and improving them, or replacing them with better ones. This includes melee combat and its attacks. There have been some animation changes to better represent which item is the player attacking with, like a new sprint-attack with the baseball bat. Also, a lot of work has been put into finger poses so that the character is holding various items the best way it can. Some of the recent animation additions include the new IZH43 animation set, and some gestures like nodding head, shrug, and "OK".

One of the more significant improvements to player locomotion is the ability to jump over obstacles. The feature is still work-in-progress, as well as the animations, but the character is now able to overcome small objects that are in his way by jumping over them. We are now in the process of adding all the animation variations for different directions and items in hands. At the same time, our programmer is working on the climbing for players and soon, we will start implementing animations for it.

As we also started tidying up some animations and features, there is an ongoing work on player actions. This includes polishing of existing animations, some graph tweaks, but also some new animations to better visualize what the character is doing. Our Technical Animator Adam will share more details on what was happening over the past weeks regarding various animation improvements related to these actions.

Make sure to check out the gifs for the baseball bat attack, cutting down bushes and, jumping.

Cheers!





- Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator

 
For the past couple of weeks, I have been hard at work revamping, tweaking, and creating animations for many various actions. User actions are the backbone of the game, and as such, they require thought out implementation; what items can they be done with? What stances are they realistic in? Should the character be able to move during the action? All of these play a huge role in their realization, concept, and execution.

I’ve implemented animations for on back actions (mainly important ones; drinking, eating, etc), tweaked some action animations to be faster or slower and cutting out unnecessary parts, depending on which type of action. I’ve also created and implemented animations for placing heavy items (barrels, generators, etc) and smaller items (bear traps, mines, etc), and I’ve also revamped the horticulture action animations, such as cutting down a tree with a two-handed axe, or one-handed hatchet, cutting down bushes, and getting bark from trees with knives or machetes. As a part of these actions, I also implemented some smaller QoL (quality of life) representative action animations for viewing compass and viewing the map to properly convey what the player is currently doing.

We’re in “full steam ahead” mode with the actions and their corresponding animations, and every week we’re working on new actions and polishing the animations for the ones we already have!

- Adam Oresten / Technical Animator

 
In our Status Report from 22 November 2016, we shared our plans to upgrade SimulWeather/TrueSky - a 3rd party library used to render volumetric clouds in DayZ. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, we had to ultimately cancel this plan and rather focus our attention on the current implementation that is present in DayZ since the beginning of Early Access. This has not only allowed us to make necessary performance adjustments but also to take a closer look at the visuals of clouds and what could be improved within the limits of the current implementation. Here is a short summary of what has been changed:

Regarding performance improvements we have reached a point, where we have decided to remove the ability to disable volumetric clouds on the client side - this change will take an effect once revamp of graphical options is finalized. There have been major changes in the cloud configuration, which are mainly aimed to make the clouds more visible and distinct from the skybox background. We improved the interaction of fog (in distance and height) and volumetric clouds, so that clouds should blend better with the horizon when it is foggy.

The silver lining effect of clouds has been greatly boosted during the early to late sunrises and sunsets. The movement speed of clouds during windy conditions has been reduced and we've brought additional improvements to the skybox background textures (overcast-dependent) along with some minor tweaks to the global lighting config to support the changes in the skybox and volumetric clouds.





In addition to the changes of clouds, we have also taken a look again at the visuals of rain. These new changes include:

• Closeup raindrops are much more visible now.
• Re-added effect that tries to visualize light refraction on raindrops.
• Fogginess parameter has been tweaked so the rain blends better with the background.
• Closeup rain drops are more visible during the night-time around light sources.
• Rain speed has been increased.

 





Both clouds and rain changes should be available to test once the next major Stress Test branch update happens. We are looking forward to your feedback on these improvements!

-  Adam Franců / Map Designer

 
Hi all,

The latest sound feature we started to work on are voice sounds for the character. So far we've implemented breathing when the character runs out of stamina, the sounds for holding breath while aiming in iron sight mode. and hit reactions when the character takes damage. We plan to add more sounds to create a more immersive character representation. Some of the sounds will be connected to animations, like grunts while jumping, or picking up heavy items, or sounds to emphasize melee combat. Others should be connected to character states, like the feeling of hunger or representation of disease.

So far, all sounds are placeholders and in some cases, only male sounds are played.

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

 
Hello everyone, the last two weeks were both really exciting and busy for us.

The release of Experimental was a big milestone all of us have been looking forward to for a long time. Even though we are aware of some issues on Experimental, we are happy, that you finally can play 0.63 almost whenever you want. If you haven't done it already, check our Highlight page featuring all the good stuff from this update! 




Another big event was our Community Live Stream. We knew that just a day after the release of 0.63 Experimental, there were going to be a lot of questions. Unfortunately, after announcing the stream, our beloved Eugen got sick and it was clear, that he wouldn’t be able to attend the stream. We still wanted to hold on to our promise and decided to take it as an opportunity to do our first Community Live Stream. We introduced new members of our Community team, opened Boydy's package (thanks again!) and tried to answer as many questions as possible even without the devs.

As I said before, we had a Community Live Stream. I just want to explain what it means. In future, we want to stream in two formats – a developer and a community stream. On developer streams, you can expect information directly from devs and detailed answers for your questions. The second format is more community-related. Our community team wants to talk with the community about events, content from creators and all the stuff from you because you are really important to us. We tried the first community stream and we had a lot of technical difficulties (as always, it is not fun without it, is it?). Here is the VOD from the stream:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/273523726
 

You asked who made the music on the stream. It is a member of our community from the Netherlands called L_K_P1 who makes  DayZ inspired music and we love it in the dev team! The song from the stream is named DayZ meme and here it is if you are interested:


Soundcloud
 

Do you need a new wallpaper? I have a cool one for you made by ChernoMerlo from the DrDesync’s screenshot.



And here is another one. I have it on my desktop already!



 

Shane O’Sullivan sent me a really interesting piece of a newspaper. It is named Bohemian Post and he made it by himself. There you can find news about the infection spreading across Chernarus.



 

Now I want to show you a special project by DayZUnderground called #TwitterPlay. It is an interactive DayZ story within Twitter and it is updated daily. People are making a story through their votes in polls and they can decide what happened with a survivor, about whom the story is. It is a really nice idea and we love it! Join the story and make your own part! You can find the latest part HERE.



 

Cage, who we met personally at Pax East, sent us his custom advertisement inspired by our Nota Cola and Pipsi drinks and they are pretty creative.





 

And the last two pieces of content are videos. The first one is a cinematic trailer about surviving in Chernarus and it is sick. Everyone from the dev team loves it, this is amazing work by HookOak Productions!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAqpdS7FwtE

 

The last short clip is made by our loyal member NeuroticEUROtic and he is sharing his feelings when Experimental was near.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtOjKsAiWdk

 

Time for a riddle. The riddle from the latest Status Report wasn't so hard, the rock is situated on the North-West of Svetlojarsk above the train yard. Who guessed it right?

• Megamente
• Polski Tytan
• Beehive1982
• Kerbo

 

This time we prepared this picture with Adam:



If you know where is it, tweet it to our official Twitter account with #DayZriddleTime and you can be on the wall of fame next time. Thank you guys for your content and I hope you will share your creation with us next time!

- Baty / Community Manager

 

Header image by WaffelsBR.

Dear Survivors,

today, we are releasing the DayZ 0.63 Update to the Experimental branch! With this update, you’ll be able to experience some of the key engine changes brought to DayZ. Developing this new technology backbone for the game took the better part of the past 4 years in Early Access, and we’re very happy that we can finally let everyone play what we call “the new DayZ”.

Check out this article for more information.